Why Garbage Strikes Work

By revealing social inequities and making urban dysfunction visible, sanitation strikes like the one now roiling Paris can be effective tools for change — and signs of larger discord.

Trash piles up in the streets near Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Photo by Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images

It’s hard not to be shaken by photos taken this week of Paris streets piled high with trash. Due to a strike by sanitation workers, the French capital’s sidewalks have become storage depots for uncollected garbage, with the usually imposing Seine quayside turned temporarily into a stench-ridden, rat-teeming alley. Placed against an internationally familiar backdrop of architectural elegance, the piles of trash appear to be signs of a city in escalating breakdown — proof, as the headline of an essay by French philosopher Gaspard Koenig declared this week, that “Ratatouille was a documentary.”

The reality behind the images is, as usual, more complex. Rather than a specifically Parisian form of public dysfunction (the strikers have the support of Paris’ Mayor Anne Hidalgo), the uncollected trash is a particularly ripe manifestation of the nationwide wave of labor actions that have been shutting down substantial parts of France’s infrastructure for some days. The issue sparking the action is President Emmanuel Macron’s determination to raise of the national retirement age from 62 to 64, a plan carried through yesterday by presidential fiat — bypassing the usual vote in France’s parliament, a legal but highly controversial move.